The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Thank you,” the older supervisor said. “These choices we must make—”

  “You’ve put the lives of thirty children—children who have no parents—at risk for the sake of one whose mother clearly loves her,” Truus said. “Hurry now, let’s get them all on the train.”

  As the supervisor handed the last child up to Truus, the woman whispered, “You do my sister a disservice, Frau Wijsmuller. You would have her risk her daughter’s life along with her own.”

  WITH THE CHILDREN aboard and the train leaving the station, Klara van Lange began to weep.

  “Not yet, dear,” Truus said. “There is still the inspection at the border.”

  Truus thought to tell her she was too young and beautiful, too memorable, to be asked to do this again, but although there were volunteers enough to help refugees in the Netherlands, those who would cross the border were a rarer breed.

  “I’d advise you to get used to this, but I never have,” she said. “I wonder if anyone does.”

  She handed little Adele Weiss to poor Klara. “Hold the child. She’ll make you feel better; she’s that kind of child.”

  The other children all sat miraculously quietly. She supposed that was on account of the shock.

  She said to Klara, “My father used to say courage isn’t the absence of fear, but rather going forward in the face of it.”

  Cleaning Day

  Stephan peered out into the gray Vienna morning through a gap in the closed library curtains. A bundled woman was selling swastika flags on sticks, another offered large round swastika balloons, and the “Ja” banners for the plebiscite were already painted over with huge swastikas. Men on ladders hung the symbol from streetlights. Others plastered trolley-stop signs with “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.” Signs with the same slogan topped the trolleys, which also sported giant posters of Hitler. Just outside the palais door, an open-bed truck painted with a swastika came to a stop.

  “Papa!” Stephan said, alarmed. Were they coming for them again?

  His father, giving Mutti a dose of medicine, didn’t register Stephan’s alarm. He didn’t even look up from Mutti, wrapped in blankets on the chaise by the fire with Walter and his stuffed Peter Rabbit curled up beside her as he forever was, as if he knew somehow that although no one would say it, their mother might not be here tomorrow. The five of them—Aunt Lisl was still with them—listened to the news on the radio while, throughout the house, the servants restored order.

  Stephan gathered his courage and looked out again. A driver had hopped out of the truck and was offloading bundles of swastika armbands. Crowds gathered to get them and put them on.

  It was shocking how well organized this all was, how many flags and cans of paint and armbands and balloons—balloons!—were here in Vienna without seeming ever to have arrived, to celebrate this moment the Germans wanted the world to believe was a spontaneous uprising from within Austria.

  On the sidewalk beyond their gate and on the street Stephan crossed every day of his life, people on their hands and knees scrubbed away plebiscite slogans. Not just men but also women and children, the elderly, parents and teachers, rabbis. They were surrounded by SS, Gestapo, Nazis, and local police—many holding up their pant legs so as not to get wet as they supervised the work—while onlooking neighbors jeered.

  “Herr Kline is a hundred years old, and he’s never done anything but say a cheery good morning and let people who can’t afford to buy a paper read at his stall,” Stephan said softly.

  Papa set the pill bottle and water glass beside Mutti’s largely untouched breakfast. “They’re making Vienna ‘fit’ for Hitler, son. If you’d been home—”

  “Don’t, Herman,” Mutti scolded. “Just don’t! You’ll make it my fault, for being unwell. If I were well, we’d have left weeks ago.”

  “I can’t leave in any event, Ruche,” Papa said soothingly. “You know it’s not your fault. I can’t leave the business. I only meant—”

  “I’m not a fool, Herman,” Mutti interrupted. “If you want to use the excuse of the business to save me from blame, fine, but don’t you dare make it Stephan’s fault. We’d have sold the business and left if I were well.”

  Walter buried his face in his Peter Rabbit. Papa sat beside them at the edge of the chaise and kissed Walter’s forehead, but still Walter cried.

  Stephan returned to the window, to the awful view. Their parents didn’t argue like this.

  “All of Vienna loves Neuman’s Chocolates,” Papa said. “Those thugs last night, they didn’t know who we are. Look, no one is bothering us this morning.”

  On the radio, Joseph Goebbels was reading a proclamation from Hitler. “I myself, as führer, will be pleased to enter Austria, my homeland, once again as a German and a free citizen. The world must see that the German people in Austria have been seized by a soulful joy, that their rescuing brothers have come to their aid in their hour of great need.”

  “We need to send the boys away to school,” Mutti said in a voice so steady that it alarmed Stephan even as he recognized she meant to spare him alarm. “To England, I suppose.”

  The Card Index

  A huge circular card index filled with hole-punched cards dominated the office of SD Department II/112 at Berlin’s Hohenzollern Palace. The place was littered with Austrian newspapers, books, annual reports, handbooks, and membership files men consulted as they filled out colored information cards. A senior aide went through Eichmann’s personal notes gathered from the contacts he’d been cultivating, while a second aide sat at a piano bench, inserting completed cards into the index, arranged alphabetically. At Eichmann’s entrance, Tier at heel beside him, everyone stood, offering salutes and “Heil Hitler, Untersturmführer Eichmann.” He’d been promoted yet again, to second lieutenant, and if he was still not the head of his department, he was at least in charge of this: gathering whatever information might be needed to provoke the Reich’s Jews to emigrate. His view that the best solution to the Jewish problem was to rid Germany of its rats was finally getting its due.

  He picked up copies of various publications and read random bylines and other names to the aide loading the index. At each name, the aide spun the file until he located the corresponding card, then read aloud—Jews and Jew-lovers to a man.

  “Käthe Perger,” Eichmann read from a byline in the prior day’s Vienna Independent, his attention caught by a blatantly anti-Nazi bit of trash on the front page.

  The aide spun the index, extracted a card, and read, “Käthe Perger. Editor of the Vienna Independent. Anti-Nazi. Non-Communist. Supports Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg.”

  “Ex-chancellor,” Eichmann said. “This Käthe Perger is perhaps a male journalist hiding behind the stink of women’s ink?”

  They could send the men to Dachau, but they’d have few places to hold women.

  “The information is quite specific,” the aide said. “Husband deceased. Two daughters, fifteen and three. The fifteen-year-old something of a mathematics prodigy, apparently. And she’s not a Jew.”

  “The prodigy?”

  “Käthe Perger. She’s from Czechoslovakia, and her parents were Christians. Farmers. The father dead, but the mother still living.”

  The Volk. The blood of the Reich.

  “The dead husband was a Jew?” he suggested.

  “Also Christian, the son of a barber—and a journalist like his wife. He died in the summer of 1934.”

  “In Vienna?”

  “He happened to be in Berlin at the time.”

  “I see,” Eichmann said. The husband was one of the bothersome journalists who’d not survived the Röhm Purge. “One of the suicides.”

  The aide chuckled.

  “Then good riddance,” Eichmann said. “This Käthe Perger will be someone else’s problem; we won’t be faced with the prospect of arresting someone’s mother. Our charge is the Jews.”

  “You’ll take the catalog with you to Vienna?” the aide asked.

  Eichmann said, “
The list of persons we make from it. To Linz, I hope.”

  The Problems You Fail to Anticipate

  Truus gently bounced a sleeping Adele Weiss in her arms as she negotiated with an SS guard at the border station, thinking she could use that doctor’s lucky “rock” right about now. Behind her, Klara van Lange did the best she could to keep the thirty children in line, waiting to board the train out of Germany and into the Netherlands.

  “But again, Frau Wijsmuller,” the guard insisted, “you do not have a child indicated on your passport. A Dutch child can travel with its mother without separate papers, yes, but the child must be indicated on its parent’s passport.”

  “I tell you again, sir, that I haven’t had time to change my passport.” Wishing she’d found a sympathetic traveler whose passport did list children and arranged a short border adoption. Thinking she needed to finish with this man before the child woke and cried for her mother while still in Truus’s arms. “Can’t you see she has my . . .” Eyes, Truus had almost said, but the child was sleeping, this dark, petite-faced child who looked nothing like Truus.

  “Ah, it is Mutti and her fine daughter!” someone said, the voice drawing Truus’s and the guard’s attention. It was the soldier from the inn—Curd Jiirgens, who had asked if he might dance with Klara. As the guard saluted, Truus pulled the baby closer. This Jiirgens would know she’d had no child at the inn. Lordy, what harm would one dance have done?

  “I was sure I recognized you, and yes, I am right,” Jiirgens said proudly. Then, in that officious way of senior officers, “Is there some problem, Officer? This lovely woman and her beautiful daughter don’t dance, apparently, but nor do they complain when they well might.”

  He smiled at Truus as the soldier muttered, “Her daughter,” looking from Truus to the sleeping Adele. Truus remained silent, afraid anything she said might alert the border guard to his misunderstanding, as Jiirgens offered his apologies to Klara van Lange.

  “But surely your midnight serenade was apology enough!” Klara answered charmingly, distracting both men. And then the men were helping them board the children, Truus trying not to think what it might mean that Curd Jiirgens and his men had not moved from Hamburg toward Austria to support the invasion, but were instead here, at the border with the Netherlands.

  A SHORT FEW minutes after the train left the German station, it stopped in the Netherlands. A Dutch agent boarded the carriage and, with a distasteful look at the seats all filled with children, examined the paperwork Truus offered, thirty perfectly valid entrance visas signed by Mr. Tenkink at The Hague. The station clock outside the window read 9:45 a.m.

  “These children are all dirty Jews,” the border guard said.

  Truus might have slapped him if she weren’t bringing a child across the border with no papers. Instead, she said in her most accommodating voice that if he had any doubt about the visas, she would refer him to Mr. Tenkink—keeping focus on the thirty children who had entry visas and not the one who did not.

  The guard asked them to step from the train, which was to leave again in just a few minutes. There was nothing to do but what the man asked. Truus kissed the forehead of the child in her arms as he took their papers and disappeared. She was such a sweet baby, this little Adele Weiss. Edelweiss. A spiky white star of a flower that clings to Alpine cliffsides. It had been the sign of the Austro-Hungarian Alpine troops of Emperor Franz Joseph I during the Great War; Truus had met boys with the symbol sewn to their collars. Now it was said to be a favorite of Hitler’s.

  The child looked up at Truus with a thumb in her mouth, without complaint although she must be hungry. Even Truus was hungry, having left the inn long before breakfast was served.

  Their train left without them, and the clock ticked onward, another hour of trying to keep tired and restless children amused before the guard returned. Truus handed the baby to Klara as the man approached again, supposing that if it came to it, she ought to say the baby was Klara’s. Klara was of an age more likely to have a young child. Truus ought to have done it at the German border. Why had she not?

  She answered the border guard’s further questions: “The children will be taken directly to the quarantine barracks at Zeeburg, and from there to private homes.” “Again, I am sure Mr. Tenkink at The Hague would be happy to explain that he personally authorized these children to enter the Netherlands.”

  All but Adele. Adele Wijsmuller, Truus told herself, suddenly worried she might already have told him the child’s name was Adele Weiss.

  As again he left with their travel papers, Truus repeated it to herself. Adele Wijsmuller. She said to Klara, “It takes all one’s patience to keep one’s thoughts to oneself.”

  Klara set her hands gently on the heads of two boys; as if by magic, they stopped tussling, smiled up at her, and began to play some friendly little game with their hands.

  She said to Truus, “One’s thought that these children are cleaner than that guard?”

  Truss smiled. “I knew you were the right one for this challenge, Klara. Now if only that border guard would get about his job before the last train leaves. Finding a place here to put up thirty children for the night would be an impossible task even if they were Christian.”

  “Who would have imagined it would be easier to get out of Germany than into the Netherlands?” Klara said.

  Truus said, “And it’s the problems you fail to anticipate that defeat you.”

  The Shame Salute

  Stephan stood with Dieter and their gang in the crowd, the horizon moving through the red of the German flag and on toward darkness before the first train arrived at the Westbahnhof station and soldiers emerged. The troops, led by a marching band, were barely visible down the block, but the crowd raised arms in salute and cheered wildly. Armored cars arrived from farther up the road with more Germans, some carrying torches, their stiff-legged steps up the Mariahilfer Strasse sounding a beat to the band’s music as they approached. The crowd around Stephan grew even louder, Dieter and the other boys chanting over and over with them, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!”

  Across the road, an old lady in a proper fur coat—someone Stephan might have passed any afternoon on the Ringstrasse—began to yell at a man who stood watching as silently as Stephan was, his arms, too, at his sides. The woman waved her raised hand at the man, insistent. The man tried to ignore her, but onlookers surrounded him, and he disappeared into the squall. Stephan couldn’t see what happened. The man was just gone, leaving the lady in the fur coat again shouting, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!”

  “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer, Stephan!” Dieter shouted right in Stephan’s ear, and Stephan turned to see all of his friends saluting and shouting, and watching him.

  He hesitated, alone in the massive crowd.

  “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” Dieter repeated.

  Stephan could find no breath for words, but he slowly raised his arm.

  Intertwined

  Truus stepped from the train onto the Amsterdam platform, baby Adele in her arms and thirty children still to be helped from the train. Joop took the baby from her and wrapped Truus herself in a fierce hug. Well, of course he’d been worried, and Mr. Van Lange right behind him, too, already at the carriage window, calling, “Klara?” and looking like he might cry with relief at the sight of his wife. The poor man hurried to the carriage door and began lifting the children down, welcoming them each to Amsterdam as he set them on the platform to be taken by the volunteers.

  Joop cooed at baby Adele, saying he was Joop Wijsmuller, the husband of this crazy Tante Truus, and who was she? The child put a hand on Joop’s nose and laughed delightedly.

  “Her name is Adele Weiss. She’s—”

  She was not one of the thirty, but to admit that to Joop—that the child’s mother was so concerned for her baby’s safety that she’d turned her over to a stranger without so much as papers, real or forged? That Truus herself had risked bringing a child with neither exit nor entry vi
sa over the border? That would only alarm him more, and to what end?

  “She’s quite the sweetest child,” she said. Edelweiss. A rare flower.

  Together they shepherded the children out to the electric tram, the wires overhanging all the city streets not, in Truus’s opinion, an improvement over the horse-drawn trams, but at least none of these sixty little feet would step in horse filth. Only when everyone else was on the trolley did Joop hand little Adele up to her.

  Truus, waving back at Joop as the trolley swayed and clanged into motion, thought of the beautiful wooden rocking cradle he bought the first time she was pregnant, the linens she sewed for it, the pillow sham she embroidered with a snowman on a bridge overlooking a canal and an overhang of tree branches, white on white so that you might not see the scene at all. Where were the cradle and linens now? Had Joop stored them out of sight? Or had he finally given them away?

  THE ZEEBURG QUARANTINE barracks consisted of a villa, an office building, and ten barracks, each as dismal and uninviting as the next. They were meant to house unwell Europeans bound for the United States, but what choice was there, with so many children? Truus, holding baby Adele, helped the last children climb from the trolley, a girl whose long dark braids were tied with a red ribbon, and her brother with the same sad saucer eyes. All these children had sad eyes, even baby Adele, who quietly sucked her thumb in Truus’s arms.

  The two siblings balked when Truus directed them to separate barracks.

  “We can share a bunk,” the boy offered. “I don’t care if I sleep with girls.”

  “I know you don’t, dear,” Truus said, “but they’ve set aside one place for the girls and another for the boys.”

  “But why?”

  “That is an excellent question.” Some of these girls were old enough to get into trouble, though, and some of the boys old enough to lead them to it. “I might have done it differently, but sometimes we have to live with other people’s choices, even when we might make better ones ourselves.”